The dubious doctor points out yet another laughable British court sentence against a young criminal to show how the British criminal justice system has become just another ineffectual bureaucracy concerned mainly with the growth of its (and the state’s) power.

What accounts for this ridiculous charade that is both ineffectual and totalitarian in its implications? Part of the problem is in the bureaucracy’s need to appear to be doing something without actually doing anything. But there is something deeper: namely a concerted drive, going back decades, to find alternatives to prison at all costs—including the cost of high levels of violent crime, up by nearly a hundred times since 1950.